Europeana Collections brings you closer to culture

If this isn’t your first visit to Europeana, you’ll notice that things look a little different around here. We’ve made some changes to the site so you can get up, close and personal with the vast and amazing digitized collections of Europe’s cultural heritage institutions.

For starters, there’s a fresh, new design to make it easier to navigate the site. Try out our improved search and filters, including innovative colour searches (try this one for ‘Dark slate blue’) and quality searches (find our very best maps of Paris) – these make it simple to narrow down long lists of results and find what you’re really looking for.

As you explore, you’ll also notice better, bigger previews, a zoom function for high resolution images and documents (get really close up to this Monet), direct play for video (try this silent film) and audio (listen to this Maria Callas aria) and a new download option – this means you spend less time clicking, and more time immersed in cultural content.

And clear copyright information shows you what you can and can’t do with the treasures you find. Nearly 3 million of our higher quality items are also openly licensed, which means people can use them for their own purposes. The range of this open material is breathtaking – from the unique and iconic like a painting by Edvard Munch, or handwritten notes and diagrams by Leonardo Da Vinci, to the unexpected like an allegorical and plundered painting of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II or a postcard written by Hitler.

The name is new too – ‘Europeana Collections’ lets visitors know that Europeana brings digital culture from diverse sources across Europe together.

Also new for 2016 are curated collections on popular interest topics. Europeana Music and Europeana Artare available as test versions now and will launch officially in early 2016, with other themes including fashion and newspapers to follow. Please let us know what you think using the ‘Give us your input’ link you’ll find on-screen.

See Europeana Collections for yourself with our quick demo – use the on-screen options to share it on social media.

With tens of millions of cultural items and artefacts, and a new site presenting in dazzling detail those given to us in high quality by our 3,500 partners, there’s a huge range of fascinating content to explore. We hope you enjoy your cultural journey with us.

About Europeana

Europeana.eu enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe's galleries, museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections. On this blog, you can discover treasures from Europeana's open content archives, as well as information about special events and things we are working on.

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